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AOL and Huffington Post

Online company AOL Inc. is buying the high-traffic website Huffington Post in a $315-million US deal.

The acquisition, which will put Huffington Post co-founder Arianna Huffington in charge of all AOL content, brings AOL an additional 25 million unique visitors a month.

The deal "will create a next-generation American media company with global reach that combines content, community and social experiences for consumers," AOL CEO Tim Armstrong said in a statement announcing the deal early Monday.

I have enormous sympathy for anyone writing about public affairs, whether as a hobby or as a career. And I’d encourage people to think very carefully about where they are doing their writing, and what they are getting paid for it.

The fact is, however, that sentiments like Mr. Rutten’s reflect a misunderstanding of The Huffington Post’s business model. Although The Huffington Post does not pay those who volunteer to write blogs for it, this content represents only a small share of its traffic. And, to put it bluntly, many of those blog posts aren’t worth very much.

The Huffington Post receives huge amounts of traffic: about 15.6 million page views per weekday, according to Quantcast. But it also has a huge amount of content accounting for those page views. It publishes roughly 100 original pieces per day — paid and unpaid — in its politics section alone. And politics coverage, according to Arianna Huffington, reflects only about 15 percent of the site’s traffic.

How many page views, then, does an individual blog post receive? And roughly what is it worth to The Huffington Post?

“The idea of going on strike when no one really notices… Go ahead, go on strike.”Arianna Huffington

Quote:

There has been a strike and boycott against the Huffington Post since last March, led by the Huffington Post Union of Bloggers and Writers (HPUB), the National Writers Union (NWU) and the Newspaper Guild (TNG). Please honor the electronic picket line; don’t post or share articles on the Huffington Post until this is resolved.

In the short-term, we are trying to win a settlement for the hundreds of journalists who contributed their work for free in order to bring more traffic to this “progressive” blog. These were journalists who worked on assignment, under editors. After establishing a progressive brand and following based on this free labor, Arianna Huffington sold HuffPo to AOL for $315 million, and landed a $4 million/year job as content director for AOL.

She and AOL owe these hundreds of writers, and we are working towards reaching a settlement. But even more important, we want to set a standard for a living wage for all online writers we can take to other content farms, like Demand Media, worth $1.5 billion that pays its 9,000 freelancers a penny-a-word. In the process, and in order to win these demands, we are building a bigger and more powerful NWU.

HuffPo was built by the unpaid writers who filled it with fresh content that made it stand apart from the rest. Arianna Huffington says that writers should be glad to write for free in exchange for free exposure. But it is the Huffington Post that reaped and profited from free exposure brought by these writers.

AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka, and the Presidents of the UAW, CWA and USW are honoring the boycott as is Jobs with Justice. There’s a lot at stake. We are fighting to shape the future of digital journalism. Don’t cross the picket line.